Peter G. Furst, MBA, Registered Architect, CSP, ARM, REA, CSI

Mr. Furst is presenting Workshop T2, “Best Practices for Eliminating Crane Losses,” on Tuesday afternoon. He is Technical Director of Contracting Services in the Western United States for Liberty Mutual in Pleasanton, California. He is responsible for the Pacific, West, and Northwestern regions (13 states); as well as the Pacific Rim countries served by the company's International Division. As technical director, he provides specialist support for field customer service efforts in the Contracting Service areas. Mr. Furst works directly with field loss prevention consultants as well as customer personnel to ensure superior quality and innovative consulting solutions. He consults on Lean Processes, Six Sigma, behavior management, and organizational systems and scorecards. He has consulted with numerous customers, helping them improve their organizational systems, business processes, and operational procedures to more effective levels, thereby substantially increasing operating efficiencies, internal alignment so as to reduce their cost of risk.

Mr. Furst has 20 years of construction experience with a multinational general contractor. He served as estimator, project engineer, superintendent, and project manager on numerous projects varying in size from $5 million to $350 million, involving hundreds of craftsmen and subcontractors. He also had overall safety responsibility for projects amounting to more than $450 million annually. Under his leadership, on average, the EMR hovered at or below 0.50. Mr. Furst has also consulted with numerous contracting, industrial, architecture, and engineering firms in operations and safety management, as well as consulting on lean project delivery systems, safety in design, sustainability, and other innovative organizational solutions.

He is a Registered Architect, Certified Safety Professional, an Associate in Risk Management, and a Registered Environmental Assessor. Mr. Furst has a master's degree in business administration with emphasis in management, a bachelor of architecture, and a bachelor of science in construction. He has taught organizational management, construction management, and safety courses at UCLA, USC, UC Berkeley, Cal Poly Pomona, Cal State Long Beach, and Cal State East Bay Universities. He is a nationally recognized motivational speaker in both the United States and Canada speaking on topics dealing with organizational management, lean thinking, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecards, Safety in Design, Enterprise Risk Management, leadership, as well as safety management. Some of the organizations at whose national conferences he has spoken, in addition to IRMI, are RIMS (Risk and Insurance Management Society), ASSE (American Society of Safety Engineers), NSC (National Safety Council), CSC (Construction Safety Council), IIE (Institute of Industrial Engineers), American Industrial Hygiene Association, BSN (Behavior Safety Now), NeoCon World Trade Show, ACI (American Concrete Institute), CSI (Construction Specification Institute), US (Utility Safety), WoC (World of Concrete), and AGC (Associated General Contractors). He has also spoken numerous times at regional conferences such as the Alaska, Oregon, Alabama, and Hawaii Governor's Conferences, as well as state-level conferences for the AGC, ABC, and CEA.

Mr. Furst is a past member of the San Francisco and Los Angeles chapters of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), and the National Safety Council, a member of CSI, ASSE, and AUA. He has served on the California AGC Safety, Labor Relations, Transportation, and Environmental Committees. Mr. Furst also serves as a Commissioner for the California State Board of Architectural Examiners. He is a member of a number of ANSI committees and subcommittees.